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But this Unoriginating, what is it?
We can but withdraw, silent, hopeless, and search no further.
What can we look for when we have reached the furthest? Every
enquiry aims at a first and, that attained, rests.
Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the
nature of a thing, its quality, its cause or its essential being.
In this case the being- in so far as we can use the word- is
knowable only by its sequents: the question as to cause asks for
a principle beyond, but the principle of all has no principle;
the question as to quality would be looking for an attribute in
that which has none: the question as to nature shows only that we
must ask nothing about it but merely take it into the mind if we
may, with the knowledge gained that nothing can be permissibly
connected with it.
The difficulty this Principle presents to our mind in so far as
we can approach to conception of it may be exhibited thus:
We begin by posing space, a place, a Chaos; into this existing
container, real or fancied, we introduce God and proceed to
enquire: we ask, for example, whence and how He comes to be
there: we investigate the presence and quality of this new-comer
projected into the midst of things here from some height or
depth. But the difficulty disappears if we eliminate all space
before we attempt to conceive God: He must not be set in anything
either as enthroned in eternal immanence or as having made some
entry into things: He is to be conceived as existing alone, in
that existence which the necessity of discussion forces us to
attribute to Him, with space and all the rest as later than Him-
space latest of all. Thus we conceive as far as we may, the
spaceless; we abolish the notion of any environment: we
circumscribe Him within no limit; we attribute no extension to
Him; He has no quality since no shape, even shape Intellectual;
He holds no relationship but exists in and for Himself before
anything is.
How can we think any longer of that "Thus He happened to be"? How
make this one assertion of Him of whom all other assertion can be
no more than negation? It is on the contrary nearer the truth to
say "Thus He has happened not to be": that contains at least the
utter denial of his happening.
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